In the early hours of May 30, after a night of violent protests in New York, two lawyers were arrested by the NYPD. Colinford Mattis and Urooj Rahman, Princeton and Fordham graduates respectively, were charged with attempting to firebomb a police vehicle with a Molotov cocktail.
Mattis and Rahman are now indicted on seven felony charges for which they could face life in prison. What drove two promising young professionals with top-flight educational credentials to risk everything like this?
Gary Saul Morson, an expert on Russian literature at Northwestern University, offered an answer. ‘To me it’s astonishingly like late 19th, early 20th-century Russia, when basically the entire educated class felt you simply had to be against the regime or some sort of revolutionary.’
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